Your reply at its follow-up show a much deeper understanding of how such accountability is essential to a free society.

While some may consider it silly to go into such depth about such a seemingly simple anonymous silencing of a user on "just" an online forum, the discussion does serve a very important purpose. These type of policies should not be put into place without careful consideration. As recent (and not-so-recent) history has proven, when we allow these "trivial" things to go unquestioned they quickly spread to the highest levels in our society.

Your position is very admirable. Thank you for articulating it so well. People are listening :).

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other